Tim Anderson's ITWriting

May 26, 2004

Yukon is good for the .NET Framework

It was good to catch up briefly with Euan Garden from the SQL Server team here at Tech-Ed. It is commonly remarked that Microsoft has made little use of .NET in its own desktop applications. SQL Server 2005, formerly known as Yukon, changes that. All the new SQL Server tools are Windows Forms applications, and Euan tells me his team has already written over a million lines of C#. As everyone knows, SQL Server also now hosts the CLR to enable managed code stored procedures. I asked Euan how much the requirements of SQL Server have caused changes to be made in the .NET Framework itself. He says it has been a huge influence. SQL Server is a long-running and mission-critical application, so the team has needed to ensure that memory doesn't leak and that failures are graceful and can't take down the database engine. They have also hammered on the Windows Forms team to add features and fix a variety of problems.

This doesn't surprise me. For example, Windows Forms has some serious memory leaks, such as those in the menu classes. If Microsoft had been using Windows Forms more extensively in its own applications, it's likely that these problems would have been fixed before release. Every .NET developer will be grateful that this strong internal team is exercising the Framework so thoroughly; version 2.0 will be much better as a result.